Joseph Andrews

By Fielding, Henry

Book Id: WPLBN0000675896
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.9 MB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	Joseph Andrews
Author:	Fielding, Henry
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Fiction, Literature, Literature & drama
Collections:	Classic Literature Collection, Penn State University's Electronic Classics Series Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Penn State University's Electronic Classics


Citation APA MLA Chicago Fielding, B. H. (n.d.). Joseph Andrews. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.us/

Excerpt
Excerpt: General Introduction: There are few amusements more dangerous for an author than the indulgence in ironic descriptions of his own work. If the irony is depreciatory, posterity is but too likely to say, ?Many a true word is spoken in jest;? if it is encomiastic, the same ruthless and ungrateful critic is but too likely to take it as an involuntary confession of folly and vanity. But when Fielding, in one of his serio-comic introductions to Tom Jones, described it as ?this prodigious work,? he all unintentionally (for he was the least pretentious of men) anticipated the verdict which posterity almost at once, and with ever-increasing suffrage of the best judges as time went on, was about to pass not merely upon this particular book, but upon his whole genius and his whole production as a novelist. His work in other kinds is of a very different order of excellence. It is sufficiently interesting at times in itself; and always more than sufficiently interesting as his; for which reasons, as well as for the further one that it is comparatively little known, a considerable selection from it is offered to the reader in the last two volumes of this edition.